Ronan Farrow, From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories. The New Yorker, 10 October 2017. “Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape,’ ‘The English Patient,’ ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘The Crying Game,’ ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ and ‘The King’s Speech.’ Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God. For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would ‘crush’ her. ‘I know he has crushed a lot of people before,’ Argento said. ‘That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old; some of them are older—has never come out.’
From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories
Under cover of darkness, female janitors face rape and assault
Bernice Yeung, Under cover of darkness, female janitors face rape and assault. Reveal (from The Center for Investigative Reporting) and Frontline (PBS), 23 June 2015. “Across the country, janitors at companies large and small say their employers have turned a blind eye to complaints of sexual assault, and attacked their credibility when they report abuse at the hands of supervisors or co-workers.” This story is part of Rape on the Night Shift, a collaboration between Reveal, FRONTLINE, the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, Univision and KQED.
Update: Andrew Donohue, Largest janitorial company agrees to reform response to sexual abuse. The Center for Investigative Reporting, 10 December 2015. “The nation’s largest janitorial company has agreed to an outside review of rape claims made by its female janitors in California, adding a new layer of oversight for a company with a history of facing accusations that it failed to prevent sexual violence. ABM Industries Inc. made the pledge as part of a settlement announced Wednesday night with Maria Bojorquez, a former employee who said she was raped by a supervisor while cleaning San Francisco’s Ferry Building in 2004. ABM, and the Bojorquez case specifically, was featured prominently in Rape on the Night Shift, a recent investigation into sexual abuse in the janitorial industry by Reveal, the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, KQED, Univision and FRONTLINE.”
Prep-School Predators: The Horace Mann School’s Secret History of Sexual Abuse
Amos Kamil, Prep-School Predators: The Horace Mann School’s Secret History of Sexual Abuse. The New York Times Magazine, 6 June 2012. Behind the Cover Story: Amos Kamil on Sexual Abuse at Horace Mann: ” Penn State [2011] was the watershed moment for me personally. I reached out to a friend of mine who had talked about being abused at Horace Mann just to ask him how he was doing. And he said he wasn’t doing very well because of it. And he also said, “I wish someone would write about what went on at Horace Mann.” I found myself on the train the next day from New York to D.C., and I had my laptop, so I just wrote what I thought I knew the whole way down. And I looked up at the end of the trip and had written 30 pages.”
The Invisible Army: For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell
Sarah Stillman, The Invisible Army: For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell. The New Yorker, 6 June 2011. “More than seventy thousand ‘third-country nationals’ work for the American military in war zones; many report being held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by subcontractors who operate outside the law.”